The zero to one journey of India’s largest social commerce platform

Episode Description

In Episode 4 of Summit Series, Mukul Arora (Partner, Elevation Capital) speaks to Vidit Aatrey (Founder and CEO, Meesho) on the zero to one journey of building India’s largest social commerce platform.

In the six years since its inception in 2015, the scale at which Meesho operates is spectacular. Today, Meesho has over 13 million registered entrepreneurs on its platform, a majority of whom are women, and over one lakh registered suppliers, most of whom are SMEs and new to the internet. The company has helped generate over INR 500 crore in income for entrepreneurs so far and was valued at USD 2.1 Bn in the most recent round of financing led by Softbank.

In this episode, Vidit speaks about how he and his co-founder (Sanjeev Barnwal) zeroed in on ‘Meesho 1.0’, the insights which led them to pivot the platform towards women, why he believes that less capital is a blessing in disguise for startups, the culture of customer obsession at Meesho and more.

Episode Summary

00:24 - Introduction to Meesho and its pioneering journey

4:36 - Building the early team at Meesho

6:17 - Characteristics of an ideal co-founder

18:17 - Meesho 1.0 — building a product that helped local shops sell directly to customers on Whatsapp

21:51 - Meesho’s focus on building a product targeted towards women

28:15 - How customer retention became the north-star metric for Meesho

32:53 - Why less capital can be a blessing in disguise for an early-stage startup

41:40 - PMF is not a binary concept; it is on a spectrum from weak to strong PMF

44:41 - ‘Listen or die’ - the culture of customer obsession at Meesho

49:05 - Vidit’s advice to founders raising early stages of capital